Poetry

A river runs through the Korean countryside on the outskirts of a minor city.   Gradually something floats into view: it’s a girl, face down.   In the city a senior (Jeong Hie-yun) visits her doctor and confides, in her shy way, that she’s starting to forget words.   She returns to the apartment where she’s raising her teenage grandson.   The grandma and the teen, memory and the dead girl’s fate: these, then, are the characters and themes.   It turns out they are interwoven in a way I won’t divulge except to say that it involves a horrible crime.   This movie will also be about creativity: having begun attending a poetry class in which each student must write one poem by the end of the term, the grandma begins willing herself to see the world like a poet even as she is forced to face its harsh reality.   There’s no critique of this particular society in the portrayal of the teen.   Rather, he’s like all teens at all times: unresponsive, sullen, sleepy.   He eats junk food, enjoys junk TV.   Still, in a quiet way the film illustrates how capitalism has eroded social structures and the culture.   No one has a conscience: they just want to forget or cover up.   This is something the grandma can’t do, even though it would be easier, even though it devastates her to be made to view her grandson as a monster.   She loves him, after all.   She begins walking in the dead girl’s steps, visiting the bridge from which she leapt, peering into the school science lab where the crimes occurred.   And all the while she continues to struggle to compose her poem.   There is no score to tell us what to think or feel; the director, Chang Dong-lee, favors an objective style.   It’s flattering.   However, at 2 hours and 19 minutes, the picture is longer than it needs to be.   I understand that it’s about finding the poetry in everyday life; however thematically resonant, though, we could have done with less of the long, static shots of her fellow poetry students providing personal reminiscences.   There is also rather too much coverage of the poetry readings she begins attending.   Throughout, though, Jeong Hie-yun has given us a memorable character: a senior yearning to learn to express herself, whimsical but with a steely, resilient core.   At the end of the day, this is a woman who does what she needs to do.   And though it’s in her nature to suppress disturbing truths (raising the question of how much of her intermittent disconnects from reality are a coping mechanism and how much a result of the Alzheimer’s), she alone cannot forget—will not forget.     There’s a remarkable, moving passage of cinema at the end (spoiler alert!).   We’re looking through the eyes of the late girl as she makes her rounds on her last day alive.   She greets her dog.   She peers into her classroom.   She stands on the fateful bridge, then turns and looks right at us.   The soundtrack for this odyssey is the grandma’s unveiled poem.   Creativity, memory, empathy: from these things the grandma has forged a poem that gives the dead girl a voice, and by doing so, found her own.   Rating: ****    Key to ratings: ***** (essential viewing) **** (excellent) *** (worth a look) ** (forgettable) * (rubbish!!)

- Mar 31, 2011

My Dog Tulip

This is an animated film for adults based on venerable BBC staffer J.R. Ackerley's delightfully scatological, not at all politically correct classic of doggy literature.   Ackerly, a bachelor who'd spent a lifetime hoping for but never finding an "ideal friend" in human form, was in his 50s when Tulip came into his life.   Dog lovers will laugh in recognition and remembrance of their own dogs (and themselves) in the relationship portrayed on screen, especially, perhaps, those for whom a dog is their sole companion. Christopher Plummer's voice is a perfect fit for Ackerly's, conveying his tone of wry disappointment in the human world, while Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's animated watercolors bring to life his funny, fanciful descriptions of dog behavior.   The artists have a real talent for rendering a dog’s body--Tulip in repose and in action: running, tumbling, puking, crapping, humping, barking...and, above all, delighting in the world around her and in Ackerly’s company. I won’t soon forget the little lyric Ackerly invents for Tulip as she sniffs excitedly at the world around her: "Human beings are prudes and bores/You smell my arse, I smell yours." Rating: ****    Key to ratings: ***** (essential viewing) **** (excellent) *** (worth a look) ** (forgettable) * (rubbish!!)

 - Jan 13, 2011

127 Hours

In the opening moments of “127 Hours” Danny Boyle throws a split-screen triptych at us.   It shows (1) beautiful time-lapse freeway imagery; (2) marathons and cyclists; and (3) in contrast to these rushing rivers of communal humanity, a young man, Aaron Ralston (played by James Franco) gearing up for a lone weekend of “X-treme” climbing in Utah’s Blue John Canyon.   We recall hearing the news story about the guy.   He took a spill down a crevice, taking a boulder along with him which crushed his arm against the wall.   There he remained, until after about five days he came to a realization: it’s either grit your teeth and do what needs to be done to free yourself, or die at the bottom of a crack.   (Useful metaphor, that.)   And so, using a blunt penknife, he sawed off his own arm.

The opening foreshadows the solitary immobility that we know lies in store for Ralston, but it also illustrates something about Boyle that something in me resists: the way he seems to think I need constant stimulation.   It’s rock & roll filmmaking, and I usually like that, but I can’t but feel like he’s trying too hard to sell me something.   (I noticed this more in “Slumdog” than I did in “Trainspotting,” “Millions,” or “28 Days Later,” all of which I liked a lot.)   Still, there’s no question that he is a bravura filmmaker.   His camera goes everywhere: the bottom of a water bottle, an X-ray-like cross-section of the arm at the point where Franco’s exploring knife first tentatively touches bone.   “127 Hours” is grueling and won’t be for everyone, but if you are going to see this you’ve got to catch it on a huge screen, to feel the immensity of the big sky, the intoxication of the gorgeous Western landscape.   You’ll benefit from a theatrical sound system as well, since music and sound design are a big part of the Boyle experience.

Having recently seen Franco do a spot-on young Ginsberg in “Howl,” I’m impressed by his range.   He’s just right here as Ralston, a carefree young guy, friendly but callow, who tends to take other people for granted.   We see a girlfriend leaving him (the setting is the stands of an arena), watch him ignore her, keeping his gaze fixed on the game as she says, “You’re going to be so lonely, Aaron.”   At such moments “127 Hours” reminded me, oddly enough, of “A Christmas Carol,” as did the ending: another chance to get life right.   The montage is fragmentary, suiting the stream-of-consciousness of dream and memory.   Sometimes we see a detail—a patch of his ex-girlfriend’s naked body, say—before we see the whole.   And in fact what the film conveys very well is the visceral realization that the things he took for granted, including human relationships, are the very things that could have saved him…just as thinking he could go it alone is what sealed his fate.

In an early sequence he meets two young women lost in the desert and offers to guide them to where they’re going.   They decide to trust him, and he leads them into a narrow, floorless passage.   Scooting their backs along the wall of the corridor whilst bracing themselves against the other with their scuffling hands and feet, the women watch in horror as Franco suddenly lets himself drop down the wall, sliding out of sight into the darkness.   We then see that he’s slipped through the ceiling of a cavern, freefalling through the air to splash down in a pool far below.   Soon they’re doing it as well and having a blast.   If in the past I haven’t trusted Boyle entirely, by the end of “127 Hours” I understood something I hadn’t before: like Ralston, he’s motivated by nothing more than to show us something that will move and exhilarate us.  

Rating: ****  

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Nov 23, 2010  

Howl

In “Howl”, James Franco doesn’t merely demonstrate an unerring ear for the cadences of
Allen Ginsberg’s speech: he embodies the poet’s warmth, gentleness and deep humanism
as well.   Recreating an interview taped in ’57 while Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on trial for
selling Ginberg’s titular masterpiece, Franco’s Ginsberg speaks candidly about what he
was trying to accomplish with that poem (to express the realities of the demimonde) and
offers up some interesting ideas about writing (it is a form of meditation; one must
approach one’s muse as frankly as you would your friends).   He goes on to tell the story
of the lifelong struggle that went into the poem, to find his voice and to become himself,
interweaving the two so inseparably that you start to understand censorship as an
almost existential crime.   In floating memories we glimpse encounters with counterculture
heroes such as Carl Solomon, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, but these personages are
more like dream shadows and are not vividly incarnated.  

And why are the courtroom scenes so oddly stilted?   (Intentionally or not, there’s a meta
dimension to casting Jon Hamm as Ferlinghett’s defense attorney: on “Man Men” Hamm
plays a quintessential early 60’s man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit with a hidden side to which
the incipient counterculture speaks.)   Maybe the filmmakers (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey
Friedman) wanted to contrast straight-world sterility with the animated segments that
illuminate the large swaths of the poem Franco reads on the soundtrack: the animation is
jazzy, explicit, and kinetic, if perhaps too on-the-nose at points.   Hearing the poem read
aloud reminds us what an act of rock & roll it was: physical, honest, free, a taking up of
arms in the struggle against turning oneself into a robot.  

We also see Ginsberg in a Greenwich Village club giving a reading which builds into an
electrifying affirmation of all that exists.   We see him fully inhabiting the vocation of the
poet, breathing a world into life from a handful of words, making words perform magic.  
Even the courtroom scenes, the film’s least successful, make one proud of the wiseness of
the “straight world” and the Constitution (Tea Partiers notwithstanding), as the
bespectacled, conservative-looking judge (Bob Balaban), his ears still ringing with
hardcore images of acts he must have barely known existed, gives his verdict, calmly and
rationally restating the case for that cornerstone of principles: in America we must never
censor.  


Rating: ****  

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Oct 21, 2010

Winter's Bone

"Winter's Bone" shook me more than any film I’ve seen in recent memory. It's about the
Missouri Ozarks and a teenage girl named Ree who’s a fish in that water, played by
Jennifer Lawrence in a really good, natural performance. Responsible for taking care of
her little brother and sister and her mentally ill mother, she must hunt down her meth-
cooking, bail-jumping daddy before the court seizes their home.

The underground drug economy seems to be just about the only industry going in the
Ozarks, and all of Ree’s kin subsist off it to more and less tangential degrees. These
people are as volatile as the chemicals they cook, should you happen to nose into their
business looking for your missing father. They consume pills and powders as a matter of
routine, simply as a way of escaping the dreariness of everyday reality.   (Though she's
constantly being offered, Ree doesn't partake; maybe when you're not sheltered, drugs
lose their allure.)  

John Hawkes gives a nuanced performance as Ree’s rawboned uncle, Teardrop, a truly
dangerous man. Once he realizes that Ree, though scared and unsure of herself, is not
going to stop until they kill her, we come to see him as an interesting mix of menace and
protector, an unsettling upholder of the family ties that bind.

It’s a cold world that writer/director Debra Granik (adapting one of Daniel Woodrell’s
“country noir” novels) gives us, yet there are oases of warmth.   Ree comes upon a
birthday party where the men and women are celebrating by singing and playing
mountain music: the scene plays like a glimpse into a pocket of community that meth
hasn’t yet dissolved.   (In an organic way the film is a trenchant look at male/female social
relations in the Ozarks.   The meth men use at least the tacit threat of violence to control
their women, but Ree doesn't seem to have ever developed the instinct the other women
have of knowing just how far to prod their men and no further.)    

By the way, if you get a chance you’ve got to check out Granik’s last feature, “Down to
the Bone”, in which Vera Farmiga plays a cokehead working mom.   Farmiga gives a
performance that’s close to perfect.

Rating: **** 

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Aug 4, 2010